Technology’s greatest myth

I wrote this at the end of last year as my final column for BBC Future, aiming to make 2014 a year for longer essays and projects (and paying attention to my young son). It’s a reflection on a couple of years of fortnightly writing about technology, ideas, and tech’s larger place in our sense of the world.

Lecturing in late 1968, the American sociologist Harvey Sacks addressed one of the central failures of technocratic dreams. We have always hoped, Sacks argued, that “if only we introduced some fantastic new communication machine the world will be transformed.” Instead, though, even our best and brightest devices must be accommodated within existing practices and assumptions in a “world that has whatever organisation it already has.”

As an example, Sacks considered the telephone. Introduced into American homes during the last quarter of the 19th Century, instantaneous conversation across hundreds or even thousands of miles seemed close to a miracle. For Scientific American, editorializing in 1880, this heralded “nothing less than a new organization of society — a state of things in which every individual, however secluded, will have at call every other individual in the community, to the saving of no end of social and business complications…”

Yet the story that unfolded was not so much “a new organization of society” as the pouring of existing human behaviour into fresh moulds: our goodness, hope and charity; our greed, pride and lust. New technology didn’t bring an overnight revolution. Instead, there was strenuous effort to fit novelty into existing norms.

The most ferocious early debates around the telephone, for example, concerned not social revolution, but decency and deception. What did access to unseen interlocutors imply for the sanctity of the home — or for gullible or corruptible members of the household, such as women or servants? Was it disgraceful to chat while improperly dressed? Such were the daily concerns of 19th-century telephonics, matched by phone companies’ attempts to assure subscribers of their propriety.

As Sacks also put it, each new object is above all “the occasion for seeing again what we can see anywhere” — and perhaps the best aim for any writing about technology is to treat novelty as not as an end, but as an opportunity to re-scrutinize ourselves.

I’ve been writing a fortnightly column for the BBC since the start of 2012, and in the last two years have watched new devices and services become part of similar negotiations. By any measure, ours is an age preoccupied with novelty. Too often, though, it offers a road not to insight, but to a startling blindness about our own norms and assumptions.

Take the litany of numbers within which every commentary on modern tech is couched. Come the end of 2014, there will be more mobile phones in the world than people. We have moved from the launch of modern tablet computing in mid-2011 to tablets likely accounting for over half the global market in personal computers in 2014. Ninety per cent of the world’s data was created in the last two years. Today’s phones are more powerful than yesterday’s supercomputers. Today’s software is better than us at everything from chess to quiz shows. And so on.

It’s a story in which both machines and their capabilities increase for ever, dragging us along for the exponential ride. Perhaps the defining geek myth of our age, The Singularity, anticipates a future in which machines cross an event horizon beyond which their intellects exceed our own. And while most people remain untouched by such faith, the apocalyptic eagerness it embodies is all too familiar. Surely it’s only a matter of time — the theory goes — before we finally escape, augment or otherwise overcome our natures and emerge into some new phase of the human story.

Or not. Because — while technological and scientific progress is indeed an astonishing thing — its relationship with human progress is more aspiration than established fact. Whether we like it or not, acceleration cannot continue indefinitely. We may long to escape flesh and history, but the selves we are busy reinventing come equipped with the same old gamut of beauties, perversities and all-too-human failings. In time, our dreams of technology departing mere actuality — and taking us along for the ride — will come to seem as quaint as Victorian gentlemen donning evening dress to make a phonecall.

This is one reason why, over the last two years, I’ve devoted a fair share of columns to the friction between the stories we tell about tech and its actual unfolding in our lives. From the surreptitious erosion of digital history to thedumbness of “smart” tech, via email’s dirty secrets and the importance of forgetfulness, I love exploring the tensions between digital tools and analogue selves — not because technology is to be dismissed or deplored, but because it remains as mired in history, politics and human frailty as everything else we touch.

On which note: what do you think is most ripe for abandonment around technology today? Which habit will come to be seen by future generations as quaint — our equivalent of putting on bow ties for telephones? If you have any thoughts, please Tweet me at @TomChatfield and let me know what you think.

2 Comments

The question should be “is the singularity concept something we’ll look back on like putting on bow ties for telephones, blissfully unaware of the greater ramifications?”

Conditionals are the methodology of computing’s “knowledge” abilities, now.

We need a paradigm shift in computing approaches before anything like a “singularity” is possible. And we don’t even really know what that entails. Until then we’ll just be the victims of Big Data Analysis.

However at some point someone will invent the next logical (pun intended) approach to computing, and something might well achieve its enlightened state, but will instantly form another shape, and so on. Because it’s not limited as we are in the collective experience and consciousness of being humans – a mammal species of earth – it won’t perceive boundaries of that sort and will progress differently than we do. //Caveat: If one can considers our species to have progressed

It’s going to be constrained in other ways, but not in anywhere near the ways we are, nor that we likely understand, so will depart what we know of sentience in the same instant it displays it. Not for any other reason than not being bound to our limited variations of consciousness.

We may not even have time to see it transcend our limited visions of sentience.

What is most ripe for abandonment, most probably quaint in the future are our given names, I think. We already have gaming IDs and made-up names on twitter, chatrooms, emails etc, so I can see people having a whole raft of monikers, different for work, relationships, clubs, sport, every activity, even the cinema or supermarket, so that many contacts will have no idea any more what we were called at school, or even before that. Legal ID will be fingerprint or iris recognition or something.